Hand-drawn flash sheet of five black and white circle designs, from a filled dot to a full yin yang, each captioned in handwritten lettering.

Yin yang sequence with hand-lettered captions

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn sheet of five stacked symbols in black ink on white paper, moving from a solid black dot to an empty circle, then two teardrop-shaped yin yang variants and a full yin yang. Each symbol has a handwritten caption, and the lettering is bold and simple with no shading. The composition is a vertical column, with the final caption HERE IS LIFE in larger capitals at the bottom.

Yin yang Circle Dot Teardrop Lettering Life

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Tomas had ground soot for the abbey's ink for eleven winters, and he knew the black by its weight on the spoon. So when the prior sent him down to the cellar with a clay lamp and a question, he took the lamp and did not argue.

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The question came from old Ambrose, who had copied psalms in the scriptorium until his fingers curled like dry leaves. He wanted to know what the good was and where the bad lived inside it. "Draw it for me," he said, "so I can see it before the thaw takes me." Tomas drew a black dot, a full stop of ink, and called it the bad. Then he drew an empty ring and called it the good. Ambrose squinted and said a child could tell those apart.

So Tomas kept going. He drew a ring with a black seed inside it, then one with a white seed, and then the two bent round until they became a pair of fish chasing their own tails. Ambrose laughed, a cough and a wheeze, and said it was the only true thing ever drawn in that room. He made Tomas write the words beneath in capitals, slow, because the cold had got into his hands.

Ambrose died at the spring thaw. The sheet was pinned above his bed, and the novices who came after read the captions aloud, some of them thinking the last line was a joke about the bell rope. Tomas kept the lamp. Each morning he filled it from the same oil, and the soot stayed in the creases of his thumbs, where it always had been.